Introduction of the artist:

LU Yang (China)

Born in Shanghai, China. Lives and works in Shanghai, China.
Selected solo exhibitions: 2011 The Anatomy of Rage (Wrathful King Kong Core), UCCA, Beijing; 2011 The Project of KRAFTTREMOR, Boers Li Gallery, Beijing; 2010 Lu Yang Hell, Art Labor, Shanghai; 2010 Torturous Vision, input; output, Hongkong; 2009 The Power of Reinforcement, Zendai MOMA, Shanghai;
Selected group exhibitions: 2012 It Takes Four Sorts, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; 2011 Video Art in China – MADATAC, Reina Sofia Muesum, Madrid; 2011 Moving Image in China:1988-2011, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; 2011 In a Perfect World…, Meulensteen Gallery, New York; 2010 Young Media Artists: China, Japan and Korea’ in INDAF 2010, Tomorrow City, Songdo, Incheon.

Introduction of works:

Using 3D animation, video projections, detailed schematics and medical diagrams, Lu Yang blazes new trails between art and biological science. In the Anatomy of Rage, she took a seemingly scientific approach to meet a religious belief, where paradoxically, precise images, accurate data and rational analysis manifest a particular kind of human mood, which is shapeless, weightless and fugitive. In the artist’s own words, it is “a foolhardy attempt to superimpose religious concepts of wrathful deities onto scientific theories of the brain’s anger response mechanisms”.

In her most recent work, Lu Yang discovers a strange world through infrared photography, which is an imaging technology to read and display the object based on its thermal data. These ‘thermal images’ can present a different reality compared to ‘photographic images’. In infrared photography, cooler parts of the body disappear in the background, such as artificial limbs, false teeth, or even a fingertip whose blood flow has been blocked for a while by an elastic band. Also, it can observe thermal changes to the parts of the body affected when either blood is taken or a saline drip is given intravenously. These infrared videos are displayed on a series of oscilloscopes with full thermal diagrams, as if in a biological laboratory, to respond to a projected MTV, in which human beings and animals, the warm-blooded and cold-blooded and the alive and the dead, are all similarly coded outside the visible world. Along with the screams of the heavy metal music and the glary colours, they move, twitch and dance. The artist presents her visual narrative about life – irrational but real, refined but inherently violent and terrifying. Ironically, the thermally sensitive technology has somehow arrested the images full of disease, deformity and violence – a world without temperature. It does not only reveal the invisible, but also reflects on the temporality of material lives and social and moral boundaries.